Mina Loy: Psycho-Democracy

Abstract When Mina Loy’s first four ‘Love Songs’ appeared in the first volume of the New York magazine Others in 1915, their sexually explicit subjectmatter, Futurist content, explosive wit, and use of free verse were a fitting beginning to a new magazine devoted to ‘the new verse’. In the November 1915 issue, the magazine’s editor, Alfred Kreymborg, in a foreword, quotes from J. B. Kerfoot, who claims that the new poetry entails a new political sensibility: ‘By the way, the new poetry is revolutionary. It is the expression of a democracy of feeling rebelling against an aristocracy of form.’ In 1914 Pound had described the new poetry in precisely the opposite sense, defending what he called the new ‘aristocracy of the arts’ against artists who dabble in democracy. Whereas Pound and Eliot defend poetic authority against an expressive individualism, here those values are reversed, as expression is privileged over form. Where should Loy’s ‘Love Songs’ be positioned in relation to these opposed ways of understanding the relationship between poetry and authority? We might expect Loy, who explicitly identifies herself as an international ‘psycho-democrat’ in 1921, and whose poems had a prominent position in Others over a number of years, to align herself with Kerfoot’s ‘democracy of feeling’. Yet Loy’s poems do not sit happily with the expression ‘democracy of feeling’, as they are perhaps most distinctive for their extinction of personality, foregrounding of aesthetic artifice, and, according to Pound, lack of ‘emotion’.